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In sensible attempts to keep our functional sanity intact, many of us stuck at home are treating the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic as a chance to catch up on a lifetime’s worth of New Year’s resolutions.

Want to read the complete works of Karl Marx? Now’s your moment, comrade! Or is a Haruki Murukami-style 100 push-ups a day suddenly achievable? Let’s do this! Or perhaps — kids finally napping — it’s time to pop on the Oakleys and some headphones and finally master that bass guitar!

Eternal Family glows with Edmonton links, including a Mac DeMarco how-toBack to video

Of course, and please don’t be ashamed of this, what’s really going to happen is you’re going to watch a lot of TV.

Enter Edmonton ex-pat Cole Kushner’s subscription-based web channel, Eternal Family — eternal.tv online. According to the weird grinning otter in its trailer, “It’s an artist-run membership experience, and a place to try out new ideas.”

A collection of dozens of indie filmmaking experiments from around the world, it’s also stacked with Edmonton content. This includes a short film about building creepy statues by local artist Nickelas Johnson, and another by slacker rock superstar Mac DeMarco, which the 29-year-old singer describes as a “totally normal and informative recording tutorial show with Vaseline all over my face.”

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Which brings us back to Karl Marx and those phantom push-ups.

Much of eternal.tv’s content is instructional. For example, DeMarco’s first episode mixes genuine enthusiasm for subject matter — building a reverb recording chamber — with a kind of deadpan humour, exemplified as he asks in a digitally-deepened voice, face buried under a topography of never-acknowledged petroleum jelly: “Do you have an empty room in your house? What about a garage? A pantry? A basement? A loft? An attic? A cellar?” And, again, “A pantry?”

The host of Shop Time on eternal.tv, Johnson notes, “I particularly love Mac’s show Advanced Recording Techniques. I’ve plugged many hundreds of hours on YouTube looking at this kind of thing, and this is actually educational.”

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Johnson laughs, “It takes him 18 minutes to do something that would normally take three minutes — but I love the tone.”

Still from Eternal Family’s Claire Paints.supplied

Meanwhile, mixing Matisse with Bob Ross, the show Claire Paints finds Claire Milbrath indeed painting in various gardens and living rooms, as — to great effect — vintage figure skating commentary plays for the audio. It’s pure delight when she turns and smiles at the camera.

Jerry Paper Teaches’ first episode “Funk Track” is completely useless as learning, but his deliberate misunderstanding of music as he creates and endorses his insane, unlistenable noise is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in ages. Finally, the coming-soon Making with Salina, where Salina Ladha creates ceramics, features a score by Peter Sagar, and both are former Edmontonians.

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Eternal’s mastermind Kushner now lives in Victoria, an animator and editor whose accolades include having made a pilot called Dayworld for Adult Swim.

“I was kind of going back and forth if experimental is a low priority or a high priority right now — but I think it’s a positive thing,” he says from Victoria.

“I’ve been at home working on TV and commercial projects for the past five or six years. After the Adult Swim pilot I had a few pitches for ideas and one of them was sort of a variety show. Stuff in the pitch network world seems to take forever, and at the same time I had a lot of energy for it, so I thought, why don’t I just make this myself?”

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Cole found a service “which kind of allows you to build your own Netflix-style site, basically.” He defines the entire project as an “artist-made video membership site, a place to try out things. The ultimate goal being sustainable income for a group of creators.”

That setup sees 60 per cent of revenue go to the creators, the other slice of the jingle sack going to operations and licensing more weird content, including a section — think of those Netflix rows — titled Old Ones, featuring licensed and public domain content including the 1939 Fleischer Studios Gulliver’s Travels and 1929 Japanese animation, Kubutori. The cost is comparable to coffee, way cheaper than a bucket of chicken — $5 USD a month or $50 USD a year, with new content coming in weekly.

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And it’s the new content that especially sings. “Some of them are just shot with a GoPro or some with a VHS camera,” Kushner notes. “There’s high production, too. Whatever anyone wants to make.”

The 10-minute short Banky – “The Factory” is side-splittingly hilarious, a note-perfect parody of Banksy’s very serious commentary on corporate culture. In the satire, our hero Banky takes on “a pretty negative experience I had at the Old Spaghetti Factory” by dropping off a bowl of pasta mixed with barbed wire to a bewildered customer on the patio. “I think pasta came at least in Italy in the 13th century,” he says, voice altered, face pixelated. “I’m probably the first person or the first artist who brings this type of energy to this dish.

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“At least I hope so.”

Some of the Eternal Family Stock Footage series.supplied

The channel also includes a series of stock videos including Man Riding Escalator and Man Sitting Down, where its subject is constantly laughing.

As curator, Kushner says the thread running through the films “is definitely something I feel more than I can articulate. Definitely gravitating to slower, meditative, more existential comedy — but not all comedy,” he laughs. “Some of it’s not funny at all.”

While Johnson loves the “elite, super nerd comedy base,” he’s drawn with a certain horror to art made by robots. “Machine Symphony is f—ing insane. Basically this guy is a computer programmer, and all the visuals are computer generated by an AI that he let ran loose.

“It’s almost too scary to watch with the world the way it is right now. It feels like what kind of TV will be on the air once the disease the computers created wipe us all out.”

Says Kushner, “The result is pretty unsettling.”

But see for yourself at eternal.tv — the site launched Monday, and that dusty bass guitar isn’t going anywhere, anyway. Welcome to Eternal Family!

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